Groupon Disappoints 40% of Retailers

A study of retailers using Groupon found 66 percent of the 150 merchants saying it was a profitable exercise, while 32 percent said their Groupon campaigns were unprofitable, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Forty percent of the respondents said they would not run such a promotion again, the study by Rice University’s  Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business found.

The point is that any mobile, web or transaction service can work well only when retail partners find the application or service profitable, easy to use and desired by end user customers. So far, Groupon might need to work on that a bit.

Mobile anthropology

Mobile anthropology: you will have to wade through it, but there are insights here.

http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/joshclark/going-native-the-anthropology-of-native-apps

Adidas Gives Up On Apple's iAds?

Control issues might be an issue for iAd advertisers

http://www.techmeme.com/101002/p14#a101002p14

How Little Guys Can Win in Local Mobile Advertising: Mobile

Local mobile campaigns are affordable and targeted. If a business uses the Yellow Pages, it typically can afford a local mobile campaign.

http://jkontherun.com/2010/10/02/how-little-guys-can-win-in-local-mobile-advertising/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%29

Millennials Will be a "Great Generation," Wait and See

We might sometimes think Millennials are spoiled, flighty of attention or non-literate (in the older sense of reading lots of books). They also just might be the absolute right people to make American history. They have principles and values and will act on them, for example. And that might be just the thing America needs, sometime in this generation, when the wheels threaten to come off the car.

"Members of Gen Y strive to be awesome and distinctive. They make choices that are consistent with a set of personal values, even when they mean personal sacrifice," says Carol Phillips of Milennial Media.

"They are distinctive in the matter of face way they set audacious goals for themselves," Phillips says.

Says Alex Pearlman’s profile on The Next Great Generation Blog: "I’m a 23-year-old journalism and philosophy student, I love the John Adams miniseries, Aaron Sorkin, and reading Time magazine in bed with a glass of red wine. My interests range from libertarianism to beer bongs to the New York Times crossword puzzle. This box will one day read: Alex Pearlman, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent."

Pearlman also is an editor at http://www.thenextgreatgeneration.com/. I very much am counting on Pearlman, and her Millennial cohorts, being absolutely, dead-on right. We will need another "Great Generation," and I am counting on Millennials to be just that generation.

For Millennials, Brands Are People, Too

No Wi-Fi Business Model? Hardly

The Wi-Fi hotspot market continues to experience strong growth in deployed venues and usage, driven largely by wireless and broadband providers embracing Wi-Fi both as a competitive differentiator and enhancement to core services, says In-Stat.

Despite the continued growth in hotspot deployments, the underlying business model remains uncertain, the firm say.

“We are a decade into the introduction of hotspot services and the market is still working out the revenue model,” says Amy Cravens, Market Analyst. That might not be the best way to put matters.

“Initially the market was based on pay-as-you-go revenues, with providers hoping it would evolve into ongoing subscriptions and corporate accounts," says Cravens. There is a business of that sort, but it arguably is much smaller than some initially had expected.

But that doesn't mean there is not a business model. The business model simply is largely indirect, rather than direct. For some hotspot operators, the revenue model is products sold. For service providers, the revenue model is subscriptions to fixed broadband services that offer metro Wi-Fi access as a feature. For others, such as some airline lounges, Wi-Fi is an amenity paid for through the annual membership fee.

Wi-Fi hotspots most certainly have a business model. It simply is not a direct model, in most cases.

In-Stat - Press Releases

Does Retransmission Consent Apply to Internet Relay?

"Retransmission consent" is a decades-old issue in the cable TV business. Basically, the issue is what entities must do if they relay a broadcast TV signal, without altering the contentof the transmission.

Ivi is a service that lets users watch live television on the Internet. But ivi has not sought permission to do so from over-the-air broadcasters, nor has it paid retransmission fees.

Ivi believes it can do so because ivi does not change the original signal in any way. For a premium, ivi offers DVR “time sifting” features such as pause, rewind, and fast forward, though.

Ivi currently streams programs from New York and Seattle affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and a few other networks.

Broadcasters and copyright owners (including the major networks and Major League Baseball) have filed a lawsuit against ivi in New York federal court on September 28, as you might have expected.

Ivi has pegged its legal hopes on the “passive carrier exemption.”

The exemption makes it lawful to retransmit a transmission intended for the public so long as the retransmitter lacks control over the content of the original transmission or over the recipients of the retransmission.

Ivi believes that by retransmitting freely-available, over-the-air broadcasts and offering basic DVR-like services, it is nothing more than a passive carrier and exempt from copyright liability.

An unfavorable ruling will kill ivi; a favorable ruling would add just a bit more pressure on the rest of the video ecosystem. But most of the best programming these days is "cable only," and in a different legal and regulatory category.

After Ten Years, Round Two Of The Legal Battle Over Internet TV Is Here